A Short Attention Exercise Scattered People Can Do to Strengthen their Ability to Focus for Longer Durations
One repetition of mindful awareness only takes a handful of seconds.
Collecting repetitions for a predetermined amount of time strengthens your ability to focus.
You can structure your practice sessions to be challenging but doable.
This includes tweaking their overall durations and exploring a game-changing strategy many meditators don’t ever use.
Simple but not easy
One repetition is simple.
Riding out the clock with one repetition after another isn’t easy — for anyone.
Interval training makes mindfulness exercises more doable
Dividing mindfulness practice sessions into shorter chunks strengthens your ability to pay attention for longer stretches of time.
This works a lot like organizing swim workouts into lap-based segments.
Take five minutes to try this
Start a one-minute timer.
During the first minute, notice two breaths closely. You can control your breathing a little, a lot, or try to not control it at all.
After the second breath, take a break from deciding what to notice while waiting for the timer to go off.
Each subsequent minute, add one more mindful breath, gradually shrinking the amount of time you have to let your attention wander.
During the fifth interval, notice the sensations of breathing — with or without counting them.
To turn this into a ten-minute practice, double each of the segments. Triple them for a fifteen-minute challenge. If you’re feeling focused, treat yourself to an additional two-to-five minute cool down.
The Insight Timer meditation app has a customizable timer you can preset for mindful interval training sessions like this. The feature is available with or without a subscription.
